Until last January, the National Trust for Local News had no unifying code of standards and ethics for the 30 or so local newspapers it operates and funds across Maine, Georgia, and Colorado. Some of the newspapers – which range from community weeklies with just a handful of journalists on staff to the Portland Press Herald, the daily flagship of Maine’s largest network of independent news outlets – had their own policies, according to Amalie Nash, the National Trust’s former head of transformation. But those codes were a hodgepodge. Some were outdated. None addressed AI. And many of the newspapers had no formal ethics codes at all.
Over about six months in late 2024, Nash worked with editors at National Trust outlets to develop an ethics handbook that sets policies for all of the Trust’s newspapers. The new guidelines took effect on Jan. 13, 2025.
“The genesis of the project was believing it was important to have overarching ethical policies covering all of our journalists– policies that will be regularly taught and updated,” said Nash, a onetime senior vice president of local news and audience development for Gannett. (Nash moved in September from the National Trust to the Knight Foundation.) “We felt like it was important to have updated and comprehensive policies that would cover all of the newsrooms and be publicly accessible so that readers could see the ethics we abide by.”
Nash and her team didn’t start entirely from scratch. Like many news start-ups drafting ethics codes, she researched policies developed by other news organizations, including the Society of Professional Journalists, the National Press Photographers Association, The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, AP, and even local newsrooms such as The Colorado Sun. She also, of course, reviewed the existing policies of newspapers in the National Trust.
After she wrote a first draft of the new guidelines, she launched “a pretty robust editing process,” inviting comments from National Trust regional editors, board members, and the union representing reporters for some National Trust newspapers.
Many of the National Trust’s guidelines, such as policies on protecting vulnerable sources, assuring newsroom independence, and seeking fair comment, are standard fare. But others required more discussion.
The most hotly debated new policies, Nash said, involved crime reporting, typically a staple of local news coverage. Gannett had revamped its crime reporting policies when Nash was an executive at the company, moving toward a holistic approach that avoids sensationalism and the perpetuation of stereotypes in favor of reporting on the root causes of crime and its impact on affected communities. Nash wanted to bring similar values to newspapers in the National Trust.
The National Trust’s new guidelines, for instance, urge reporters to avoid naming suspects in crime stories unless the newspaper plans to follow and report on subsequent developments in the suspects’ cases. The new policies also strongly discourage the use of suspects’ mug shots unless public safety or other considerations outweigh the potential harm of displaying a suspect’s arrest photo.
More broadly, the new ethics policy encourages National Trust newspapers to shift their focus from coverage of individual arrests to articles that have more impact and meaning than mere police logs.
When Nash began discussing the new crime reporting policies with National Trust editors and reporters, she said, she got pushback from some newsrooms, particularly in communities affected by drug crime.
“There were a couple of people in the conversation who felt really strongly that this is an issue residents are concerned about, so we need to be the ones that are reporting day in and day out what’s happening,” Nash said. In response, she said, she argued that devoting too much coverage to low-level arrest reports can alienate your readership.
“A lot of people have turned away from news because they feel like news doesn’t reflect their own lived experiences,” Nash said. “If … all you see in this legacy news source is a few drug arrests, how does that connect you to your neighbors, to your community, to people that are out there doing really good work?”
Among the other big issues addressed in the National Trust’s new guidelines are civic engagement, AI, and takedown requests from people named in old stories. For all of them, according to Nash, robust discussion led to guidelines that acknowledge changing journalism norms.
The National Trust’s takedown policy, for instance, maintains that newspapers in the Trust will “in almost all cases” decline to remove stories because the Trust considers its articles to be part of the historical record of the community. But the new guidelines recognize that in rare cases, the harm from an old article – particularly about arrests – vastly outweighs its value as part of the historical record. If the subject of such stories can provide documentary evidence that, for instance, they were wrongly arrested or that the arrest was the result of a mental health crisis or a substance abuse problem, National Trust newspapers will consider removing the article from its online archives.
For AI guidelines, Nash said, the National Trust decided against trying to anticipate every possible use of the evolving technology and instead to focus on essential principles: National Trust newsrooms should be open to using AI in ways that serve readers; information generated from AI models must be vetted and verified, just like information from any other source; and when National Trust newspapers rely on AI to create content, they must inform readers “in ways that both disclose and educate news consumers.”
The National Trust ended up with fairly traditional guidelines on political and civic engagement, barring reporters from participating in overtly partisan politics and urging journalists to discuss participation in civic or cultural events with editors to be sure there’s no conflict of interest. Those rules, Nash said, followed a lot of discussion about journalists’ voting, including in states that require party affiliation to participate in primary elections, and their right to express their personal views in public.
“I felt like we got to a good place with it, but there certainly wasn’t consensus,” said Nash, a longtime journalist who said her training called for strict prohibitions on civic and political participation. “I think [current views are] more nuanced and I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing or that it’s bad to be having these discussions and kind of wrestling through, making sure that the ethics of yesterday still make sense as the ethics of today.”